Women's Prize for Fiction 2025: Six quick reviews of the shortlisted novels

Scroll.in

3 days ago

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
At the heart of Fundamentally is the affinity that forms between narrator Nadia, appointed by the United Nations to rehabilitate 'ISIS brides' in Iraq, and one of her subjects, Sara, an east Londoner on the cusp of adulthood.
They connect through a shared love of rollerblading, Dairy Milk and X-Men, as well as their caustic sense of humour. But the two British Muslim women have followed vastly different routes – Nadia to academia and the UN and Sara to a detention camp in Ninewah.
Nadia's story of her journey through the vagaries of the humanitarian sector, punctuated by flashbacks to her failed relationship with first love Rosy and fraught relationship with her mother, is told with a compelling mix of verve and vulnerability. It raises hard ethical and political questions along the way. But it is Nadia's mission to help Sara that gives the novel its emotional complexity and depth, drawing the reader in while denying us any easy answers.
Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
Tell Me Everything is the tenth novel in Elizabeth Strout's well-known series that sketches the lives of ordinary, yet complex characters, who enter and exit each other's lives in the nowhere town of Crosby, Maine. The three main figures in this latest instalment are 90-year-old retired schoolteacher Olive Kitteridge (recognisable from Frances McDormand's realisation in the award-winning TV series by the same name), early 60s fiction writer Lucy Barton, and 65-year-old lawyer Bob Burgess.
Loosely, this novel can be described as a murder mystery, though the plot twist of an alleged matricide and Burgess's decision to defend the case are secondary to the three main characters' process of sharing previously untold accounts of forbidden, traumatic, guilty and unrequited love. It is this telling and memorialising that produces the emotional core of the novel. If sharing their past gives the ageing storytellers some respite from the burden of their hidden lives, it is not the kind that comforts with meaning and purpose. In Strout's novel, this relief is unavailable and is replaced with the more ephemeral solace of simply being heard.
The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji
'Do they think we were just some refugees?' Shirin, one of the characters in The Persians, asks her niece Bita. 'Weren't we?' Bita replies. The question of what a refugee looks like and what kind of stories they are expected to tell is a central theme in Mahloudji's raucous, poignant novel.
The story shifts back and forward in time, from Tehran in the 1940s to Los Angeles in the Reagan years, and to both America and Iran in the 2000s, interweaving the voices of five women from the wealthy and powerful Valiat family. Mahloudji explores love, miscommunication, loyalties and betrayal across generations as well as between those who left and those who stayed behind.
Jewellery is a central theme in the novel: glistening in shops, hidden in suitcases or flung away in protest. It represents both the adornment of female identity and the weight of the history that the migrants carry with them.
All Fours by Miranda July
'Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable,' remarks one of the characters in Miranda July's latest work of fiction. This story takes sexuality as its subject along with its relationship with creativity and ageing – or more specifically, the midlife plunge from a cliff that is female menopause.
Like the author, July's nameless protagonist is 45, a successful artist, and married with a non-binary child. This auto-fiction puts the author's erotic nonconformity at the centre of the frame. Our heroine embarks on a road trip to New York, but only 20 minutes from her home, she falls in love with a young man. The pair spend two weeks together in a motel pursuing a mutual obsession, which ultimately remains unconsummated. This experience upends her life and she rebounds into turbulent adventures in sex, discovering a new sense of self.
Perhaps it could have been a little tighter than its 322 pages – but then again, it's a work that explores a capacious road to excess. All Fours is a funny, honest, rambunctious tale.
Good Girl
Aria Aber's debut is a frequently poetic and powerful künstlerroman (a novel that maps the development of an artist). It follows Nila, a young Afghan woman in Berlin, as she tries to escape from her own cultural heritage and that of the German city in which she lives.
For much of the novel, Nila moves through the margins of society, from her family home in a brutalist rundown apartment block in the neighbourhood of Neukölln to a seemingly endless cycle of underground clubs, parties and festivals. She pushes away her family, her childhood friends, and her college education to pursue an alternative creative life and a destructive love affair. Ultimately though, Nila realises that her artistic work and a truly independent life can only be forged through her reconciliation with the past.
Set against the real far-right violence of the 2000s, Aber makes clear how social inequalities and racial prejudices effect artistic access and creativity. She also acutely captures the tensions between freedom and tradition as experienced by bicultural Muslim women grappling with the expectation to be 'good girls'.
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
The Safekeep, a novel about the expropriation and theft of Jewish property during and after the Second World War, revisits a dark chapter of Dutch history.
When Holland fell to Nazi Germany, many Dutch Jews were deported to the death camps and were stripped of their homes and belongings. Van der Wouden's debut novel shines a light on the act of keeping or maintaining things left behind that were to be reclaimed by their rightful owners, but which were lost or stolen in the war.
The trauma of this history hangs over the lives of three siblings grieving the loss of their mother in 1961.
Isabel, the novel's lonely protagonist, lives alone in the family house, keeping it in order as her late mother would have wanted. All the while, she suspects that their maid is stealing from the kitchen. But following the arrival of her brother's girlfriend, Eva, Isabel discovers the truth of the house and attempts to right historical wrongs.
Éadaoin Agnew, Senior lecturer in English literature, Kingston University.
Alexandra Peat, Lecturer in the School of English, Media and Creative Arts, University of Galway.
Elizabeth J Kuti, Professor in the Department of Literature Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex.
Manjeet Ridon, Associate Dean International, Faculty of Arts, Design and Humanities, De Montfort University.